I appear here as a survivor of the sternest rigours of the legal system of this country and the United States. Having read the remarks of some of the distinguished people who have preceded me in giving this address, I detect that the usual theme is a mixture of laudations of the legal profession with learned references to Saint Thomas More. I hope you will pardon me for offering a perspective that is, in Monty Python terms, "completely different."

I think we live in a time when some of our principal occupations are fundamentally dissatisfied with their place in society. Businessmen resent that they do not have the academic prestige of a learned profession, and they have expended billions of dollars of their companies and, in some cases, their own money to propagate the fiction that business is an academic subject. It isn't. Business is an intuition supplemented by experience and one of the most frightening statistics in the United States today, along with the $17 trillion national debt, is the fact that there are 440,000 business school graduates every year. This means that probably $200 billion a year is spent to enable professors who have rarely administered anything or made any appreciable amount of money, to teach essentially esoteric subjects to aspiring businesspeople in vastly ornate monuments to the egos of captains of industry. Business ethics classes should consist not of an elaborate course consuming a year but of a one-minute admonition to be sure to observe the governing statutes and regulations.

It is a notorious fact that worries everyone that societies in the West have vastly increased their commitment of resources to elementary and secondary and undergraduate education and yet standards of education of basic language use and simple mathematics and general knowledge are inferior to what they were when I was a student more than 50 years ago. And to compound the problem, and doubtless an important part of it, teachers, an ancient and vital occupation that normally would qualify as a learned profession, often behave like an irresponsible industrial union. They fail as a group to offer any defence of their deteriorating level of service to society, and sometimes even sanctimoniously strike in the middle of the school year. They do this contrary to contractual undertakings, while inundating the media with pious assertions of their devotion to the welfare of the students and their fervent desire not to blackmail the parents of the students.

There is nothing that is more important to a modern society of responsible citizenship and ordered liberty than a free press. And the media frequently join in collective associations that purport to have some professional standing but have no such criteria for membership or defined professional standards. All literate adults, and certainly everyone in this room, are familiar with the sloppiness, the malice and the unaccountability of almost all of the media, and the indifference and Olympian posturings that await any aggrieved party who tries to set the record straight.

The claims to professional standing are even more cavalierly flouted by journalists than by teachers, and they routinely claim a lode of benefits while crying like endangered banshees if any editor, publisher or program director calls them to account for sloppy misstatements of facts or biased summaries of even simple matters.

I recently had a sharpish exchange with a furtive organization calling itself the Canadian Association of Journalists, which claimed an unlimited right to circulate monstrous libels without any obligation to publish a response or correct them, much less apologize for them. The so-called working press, though in my experience they are far from being martyrs to the work ethic, demand that employers grant them entire liberty to inflict whatever they wish on the public and that anything less than complete liberty is a compromise of freedom of the press and the public's right to know. It is like saying that management must take no interest in the quality of consumer goods — ; soft drink executives should have no right to comment on the taste of their beverages and automobile executives should have no right to take an interest in the appearance, comfort and performance of their cars. Everyone recognizes the absolute need of a free press, and attempts to regulate it, such as those now being undertaken in the United Kingdom, will fail, deservedly. But what we have is a fundamentally unsatisfactory arrangement of the media having immense power and inadequately incentivized to use it responsibly, a condition that disserves society and affects standards of public information.

I have referred to these other important occupations in order to dissipate in advance any suspicion you might otherwise have that I am singling out the law for unrepresentative criticism. I am a law graduate, from Laval University. I enjoyed my time there and had the benefit and the challenge of learning the language as well as the law, but never intended to practise and did not attempt to pass the bar. I was already engaged in the newspaper business and was, I think, perhaps the only person in history who was the publisher of a commercially successful daily newspaper while also a law student. In the intervening years, I have engaged a very large number of lawyers, including many of the best known and most capable lawyers in this country, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. While I did not wish to practise, essentially because I did not wish to work for others but rather for myself and for my own account, I care for the law, and despite what I am saying about the legal and other professions, I think that society functions well, given that it is run by people.

With that said, precisely the motive that caused me not to practise law, I think, afflicts many people who do: They resent the client, and specifically resent the fact that though the law is one of the premier learned professions, it exacts its income from clients who, for the most part, lawyers do not regard as their intellectual peers. Simply stated, a great many lawyers extract their livelihood purporting to follow instructions from people they do not intellectually respect. I must emphasize that I have never felt myself the victim of such condescensions, and of course I am aware that many clients are tiresome, ignorant, demanding and generally annoying people. But the law is not only a learned profession, it is also a service industry.

Other occupations have comparable frustrations. The professor of business and of other subjects can never get completely away from Shaw's famous dictum that "he who can does, and he who can't teaches." Even when I was an elementary school student, I thought some of those who exercised such control as teachers did in those days were people who could not make it in the real world, and so chose to become figures of authority in this quasi-Lilliput. Having employed many thousands of journalists over many decades, I have thought almost from the outset that a very large number of them are fundamentally frustrated and offended that they spend their lives reporting on the sayings and doings of others and no one is much interested in what they think. A junior reporter with a byline, if not closely edited, and they rarely are, has greater power than that journalist is usually qualified to exercise, and the results are notorious and, as I have said, practically unappealable.

Fortunately, there are inspiringly competent and dedicated people in every field, including the law. But other occupations do not swaddle themselves in their institutional indispensability — the law is, as we all know, the ultimate authority. It is what we must do and what is enforced, and for those who do not wish to be outlaws or active revolutionaries, it is inescapable, however poorly composed or mistakenly or unjustly imposed. It clothes itself always in the raiment of the distinguishing hallmark of civilization. The blindfolded lady holding the scales of justice, the truisms we were all brought up with about one's day in court and all of us being equal before the law, of what is legitimate and not just what is necessary, and what is morally right and socially best, and has to be obeyed — it is what distinguishes civilized human society from barbarism, lower orders of animals and the jungle. All occupations have or affect a group pride, but none other, not even the doctors or the most fervent of the clergy, your eminence, take unto themselves this holy mission of legitimacy, civilization and moral authority, of indispensability to human society, supported by the authority of the State.

And other occupations are not paid for dealing with what their profession itself creates. Lawyers make laws, argue the laws and judge the application of the laws. Doctors normally treat accidents or spontaneous medical occurrences; teachers provide a certain level of familiarity with given subjects. Clergy and architects are normally approached by choice; so too are business school professors. But lawyers are inescapable and are at every stage of the legal process.

Many of you know as well as I do how poorly the system often really works. There are too many laws and regulations, and they are spewed out in unmanageable quantities every year. No person would claim that your colleagues in legislatures and regulatory bodies are deliberately creating work for the profession, but I have never seen anything quite as predictable as the eagerness of the courts and taxing masters to ensure that lawyers' bills are paid, no matter how exorbitant, and, within reason, no matter how professionally poor the service. I speak, and I would not say this if it were not already publicly disclosed, as, I hope, the only person in the room who has personally paid legal bills in excess of $30 million. I have had the full range of quality of professional service, from superb to abominable, but I had to pay full rate for all of it. Precisely the pecuniary preoccupations that you have laboured your business clients with to the point of inciting a collective inferiority complex is now the chief distinguishing activity of a very large number of lawyers. These law firms are businesses, and not always very well run businesses. You know, most of © Photo: Jeremy fokkens you, better than I do, how often unsustainable guarantees are made to graduating lawyers, and excessive investments are often made in office luxuries and swank addresses. As for the impartial bench, in my experience it is often, as my friend George Jonas put it, merely the zeitgeist in robes.

I hope you will pardon me a few illustrative reflections on my own recent legal travails. I will not comment on the merits, which I believe are well-known. Court-sponsored professionals, in Canada and the United States, hijacked corporations in complete contravention of the presumption of innocence, which proved in my case to be a well-founded presumption. They drained and squandered $2 billion of shareholders' equity, bringing financial hardship to tens of thousands of homes in every part of Canada and the United States while siphoning off, as a reward for this unfortunate commercial miracle they engineered, $450 million for themselves. All counts against me were abandoned, rejected by jurors or unanimously vacated by the United States Supreme Court. Yet I could not get any traction until the U.S. High Court remanded the vacated counts back to a lower court it had excoriated for, inter alia, "the infirmity of invented law," to assess the gravity of its own errors. It self-servingly retrieved two counts. No other serious jurisdiction in the world except the United States would have tolerated this procedure. The Supreme Court of Canada unanimously upheld the lower courts and required my accusers to face my libel suit in Canada. My accusers settled my libel claim for $4 million, 250 per cent higher than the largest previous libel settlement or award in Canadian history.

What litigation of mine remains before the local courts is just a mopping-up operation against, as I have publicly described them, the "charlatans and bloodsuckers" still arguing their right to rifle through the pittance that remains of the prosperous company they destroyed. The Ontario Securities Commission doomed the company by declining to allow our privatization bid in 2005 at the behest of my chief libel defendant. This makes the piffle of its present harassments doubly irritating; but if I must deal with the OSC, I will do that at the OSC. In the United States, the legal profession has been fully complicit in the destruction of elemental individual rights. The U.S. Bill of Rights, which is the basis of that country's claim to being a fount of human liberty and individual freedom, in the fifth, sixth and eighth amendments to the Constitution, promises due process, no seizure of property without due compensation, the grand jury as an assurance against capricious prosecution, an impartial jury, access to counsel, prompt justice and reasonable bail. I received none of that. I posted $38 million in bail, was denied counsel of choice by an illegal asset freeze in an ex parte proceeding based on what proved to be a false affidavit from the FBI, and was hounded for almost a decade even though there was practically no case. The pyrotechnics of the U.S. Attorney, following the rubber-stamp approval of the in-camera charges before the grand jury, thoroughly poisoned the rather limited minds of the jury pool. It isn't a system of justice at all; the United States operates a conveyor belt to its bloated and corrupt prison system. The U.S. has five per cent of the world's population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people, and 50 per cent of its trained lawyers, who consume about 10 per cent of its gross national product. Prosecutors in the U.S. win 99.5 per cent of their cases, 97 per cent without a trial, compared to 61 per cent in Canada and barely 50 per cent in the U.K. There are 48 million Americans with a criminal record; and even deducting the 20-year-old drunk driving and disorderly conduct convictions that still prevent people from being admitted as visitors to Canada, over 15 per cent of adult American males are designated felons. This is a scandalous state of affairs; many lawyers are concerned, but where is the professional outrage? And where was the Supreme Court when the Bill of Rights was put to the shredder?

Like most of you, I believe in the confession and repentance of misconduct and the punishment of crime, but in a proportionate and, if possible and merited, a merciful way as conducive as possible to salvaging the accused for useful life in society. That is not the American way, where the prison system is designed to destroy permanently those consigned to it. In the largely private-sector prison system and for the vast and politically hyperactive correctional officers' unions — organizations that promote the welfare of a million unskilled workers who person the prisons — prisoners are the commodity and there is an insatiable demand for more of them. The role of the judge is usurped by mandatory minimums and the great majority of the judges are former prosecutors and have never freed themselves of that bias. And the plea bargain system is just usually the terrorization of witnesses into producing inculpatory perjury in exchange for immunity, including to prosecution for perjury. It is with great disquiet that I see any aspects of the American justice system being imported into this country.

So this is not just a screed, please allow me a few well-intended suggestions. We must have a serious effort to consolidate statutes and avoid the endless proliferation of them — over 4,000 new laws and regulations a year in the United States carrying heavy sanctions. There should be a standing committee consolidating and simplifying this welter of mousetraps and booby traps for the unsuspecting. The corporate governance rules must be reformed and complainants must not be allowed to ransack corporations for their own profit as they transform them into platforms to persecute those who created the value in them. This is what happened in my case. Bankruptcy laws are now largely just a racket for those who operate businesses under corporate protection and need to be radically changed. Prosecutors must not have an absolute immunity, as the Thompson case gave them in the U.S. when it was confirmed that prosecutors had deliberately suppressed exculpatory evidence for a man who sat on death row for 14 years. Prosecutors must be free to do their jobs but not to terrorize society. Prison for non-violent criminals is nonsense; it makes things worse. Non-violent people should contribute the equivalent number of years of designated work at prisoner pay scales and on a food-stamp diet and must live in conditions equivalent to assisted housing during their sentences, with not more than weekly relief from that regime. Obviously, violent criminals must continue to be segregated from society. The plea bargain must be severely policed to avoid abuses, and drugs should be legalized. The war on drugs is a colossal failure and large sections of government have been suborned by the illegal drug industry. Hard-drug users should be compelled to take treatment. I regret to say that there are too many lawyers and their work does not contain enough added value. The legal industry grows, as if on steroids, and it is in part a taxation on all those who do productive work that does raise value. Legal invoices haven't skyrocketed on the basis of supply and demand; they have been juiced upward by a cartel. Most lawyers, most of the time, are not worth ten times the hourly rate of a good plumber or carpenter. The founders of our modern common law jurisdictions never intended for these societies to be as litigious as they are, to become prosecutocracies or carceral states, or for the law to be more of an industry than a profession.

I am a person of some means and assured access to the media. Less fortunate people are ground to powder when the legal system and the media crucify them. The public defender and legal aid systems are completely inadequate and very few people can go very far in this legal system without running out of money. My distinguished former counsel Brendan Sullivan Jr., Edward Bennett Williams' successor as chairman of Williams & Connolly, famously said that "the American lawyer is not a potted plant." No, but he is fed like one, and Brendan certainly knew how to crank out the invoices. We as a society are going to have to do better for the unwary and the disadvantaged with legal problems.

The law often is famously an ass, but the profession is running the risk of turning it into a spavined ass. Do not imagine that lawyers are a beloved segment of our society. And some of us can endure obloquy more philosophically than, I suspect, the Law Society of Upper Canada could, as the outrageous persecution of Joe Groia indicates.

I have had a difficult time, but I have survived. Not having made any reference to Thomas More, at the weary end of these remarks, I will cite Cardinal Newman. "Blessings of friends, which to my door, unasked, unhoped, have come; They have come and they have gone; They came to my great joy, they went to my great grief. He who gave took away." But I am in rebuild mode now, and human nature being what it is, there were many pleasant surprises, too. And my ability to attract attention to my persecution assured a steadily growing army of supporters and, of course, as fortunes have returned, so have some absentee friends of yesteryear.

I am often asked how I sustained my morale through those challenging times, and I conclude with this thought, from the introduction to Newman's second spring, given at Oscott College when the Roman Catholic Church was reestablished on a diocesan basis in Britain after a lapse of 300 years after the apostasy of that great religious leader, King Henry VIII. My dear and always lamented friend Emmett Cardinal Carter, asked me to render it at his 90th birthday, where I imagine some of you were present.

Cardinal Newman said, "We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, never-ceasing as are its changes, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, it is set up in unity; and, though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony, how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. Change upon change — yet one change cries out to another like the alternate Seraphim, in praise and in glory of their Maker. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of the night, to be born of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its ultimate return, to triumph over that grave, towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn over the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know, withal, that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops — which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair."